Is there a McCain enthusiasm gap?

ST. PAUL, Minn. — President Bush and Vice President Cheney are going to skip the Republican National Convention, which ought to build enthusiasm here significantly.

The current administration, whose approval ratings range between “dismal” and “you’ve got to be kidding,” are a drag on the ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin, which now has adopted change as its chief message.

Story Continued Below

The same message is being pushed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and the winner in November may be the team that sells it best.

The Republicans start out in a large hole, however. From the very beginning, there has been a marked enthusiasm gap between the campaigns of Obama and McCain.

When Obama announced his candidacy on a bitterly cold day in February 2007 in Springfield, Ill., the crowd numbered more than 20,000.

When McCain announced his candidacy in Portsmouth, N.H., in April 2007, in weather that was a little blustery, but not unpleasant, a crowd of about 600 showed up.

Obama’s outdoor acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last week drew upwards of 80,000 people, who waited in baking heat for hours to hear him speak.

According to Nielsen Media Research, more than 38 million people watched Obama’s speech on TV, which is more than watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, the final episode of “American Idol” or this year’s Academy Awards and was nearly twice the audience that John F. Kerry drew at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

McCain and his new running mate drew a crowd of about 10,000 people to a baseball stadium in Washington, Pa., two days later. You can’t make a direct comparison, of course. Obama’s speech was at a nominating convention and McCain’s was not. But in St. Paul, McCain cannot hope to equal Obama’s crowd — even if McCain’s speech comes off as planned (and it might not, due to Hurricane Gustav).

The McCain campaign has sought to use Obama’s crowd-drawing abilities against him, making fun of his “celebrity” status and denouncing him as little more than a political rock star.

I get a sneaky feeling, however, that McCain would not turn down the chance to draw larger crowds. One problem for the McCain’s campaign is that he wrapped up his nomination reasonably early (and in a pretty weak field) and has had to spend a lot of time fighting for attention as Obama battled Hillary Clinton in a steel-cage death match.

“We put our race away in March, and we are being compared to the most interesting Democratic race in history,” Sarah Simmons, McCain’s director of strategy, told me. “We are running against an iconic, historic candidate by every measure. He is energizing the young and has brought a different kind of intensity to the primaries.”

But McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, said Simmons, helps to re-energize interest in the Republican ticket. “Gov. Palin is a really exciting choice,” Simmons said. “She is very likable, an Everywoman kind of person, very charismatic and an interesting character to watch.”

As it did in the primaries, the Obama campaign uses crowds as a tool to identify supporters and gather information to turn out voters on Election Day. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, says that while the Republicans organized an impressive turnout for George W. Bush in the last election, “if they didn’t max out in 2004, they came awfully close to it.”

Plouffe also said: “We are in 18 [battleground] states, we are knocking on doors every night and we are not running into a McCain field operation, not in any significant way.”

Simmons says she is not worried. “We have hundreds of thousands of phone calls going out every week, we are knocking on hundreds of doors and there is a ton of activity on the ground,” she said.

She also claims that the Obama campaign has oversold the press on its field organization and that the McCain campaign is not going to be similarly fooled.

“We made a strategic decision to stay the course and not chase their TV dollars in Florida, and we are up 7 points in Florida,” Simmons said. “In North Carolina, we are up 5 or 6 points. In Montana, they have not moved any numbers even though they say they have a big field operation and are spending millions on commercials. And they are struggling in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania.”

As to the enthusiasm gap, Simmons says, that is fast disappearing.

“The race has gotten sharper and Republican voters who have not tuned in before are now tuned in,” she said. “Base Republican intensity is getting stronger.”